Category: Quick bibliographies

Air pollution: one of the world’s greatest public health threats

Quick bibliographies

“Air pollution is one of the world’s greatest public health threats, reducing global life expectancy more than smoking, alcohol or childhood malnutrition. Recent studies estimate that fine particulate matter called PM2.5—pumped out by cars, factories, woodstoves and wildfires—causes nearly nine million premature deaths annually.” [Greenspan, J. (2023). Air Pollution Is Really Dangerous, Even More New Evidence Shows: Dirty air has been linked to poor health outcomes, ranging from suicidality…

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What is death?

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“Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries. We are here until, suddenly, like a light switched off, we are gone.  But while this idea of death is pervasive, evidence is building that it is an outdated social construct, not really grounded in…

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p53 and cancer

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p53 is a tumor suppressor protein that is the most commonly mutated gene in tumor/cancer cells. p53 is the most important and most widely studied of the tumor suppressor genes. Mutations in p53 are found in approximately 50% of all human cancers. The most studied tumor suppressor function of p53 is tied to apoptosis (programmed cell death). Cancer therapies that involve mutated tumor suppressor genes…

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Extreme heat, Phoenix Arizona USA- July 2023

Extreme heat: impacts and consequences

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Extreme heat is becoming the “new normal” for many areas of the world. The summer of 2023, for example, has seen some of the hottest days in modern history. Extreme heat is now a regular headline: How Extreme Heat Affects Workers and the Economy (New York Times) The heat index reached 152 degrees in the Middle East — nearly at the limit for human survival…

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Dust storm in Texas (USA)

Dust storms in the United States: a mixture of corporate agriculture and climate change

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The Great Plains and Midwest regions of the Unted States are seeing more and larger dust storms and higher levels of dust in the atmosphere. The increase has corresponded to an intensification of corporate agricultural practices in these regions–an example is the plowing of grasslands and marginal agricultural land in order to grow more corn for the production of biofuels. Even modest corn production on…

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Mental models: misinformation and truth

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“A mental model is a form of mental representation for mechanical–causal domains that affords explanations for these domains. Mental models contain mental representations of objects in space and the causal relations among the objects. The structure of the mental representation corresponds to the structure of the world. This analogical relation allows the mental model to make successful predictions about events in the world. The term…

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